Inbound Marketing Certification: Study Tips from the Trenches
This week, the exam period for Inbound Marketing University III closes on Nov. 12th. If you’re still busily studying, I’ve shared notes below, which I used to study for inbound marketing certification, last June. According to HubSpot’s Mike Volpe, analytics let you measure site traffic, conversion rates (from visitors to leads and leads to sales), and ROI.
Mike Volpe is Vice President of Marketing for HubSpot, a Cambridge-based company, which develops Internet Marketing software that makes SEO easy and helps you get found online.
I do not include any notes from Inbound Marketing University #2 and #3 (IMU sessions #12-#15), so make sure to review those sessions directly through the Inbound Marketing University site. For more information, you can also check out the HubSpot slides for Inbound Marketing University’s sessions on SlideShare, and Volpe’s excellent exam review, for IMU sessions #1-#10.
Happy studying!
Conversion Rates:
An example of a conversion rate is the number of people who filled out your landing page, compared to how many visited your site. If 52 visitors out of 100 completed the form, your conversion rate is 52%.
Closed?Loop Reporting:
According to the HubSpot site, “closed-loop reporting enables you to identify the marketing programs that drive not only traffic and leads, but also customers. This provides the ultimate insight into which of your marketing programs have a positive ROI” (Source: Use Closed Loop Reporting to Drive Customers, Not Just Leads ).
During the IMU exam review, Volpe further explained that closed loop marketing is “the process of being able to measure all activities and how many sales they are producing, from a website visitor, to a closed sale.”
Performance Tracking:
For tips, see 7 Ways to Boost Website Performance.
Lead Scoring:
According to the Innovative Marketer, ”lead scoring is a relative ranking of one prospective lead against another.” Steve Gershik explains how this ranking process determines your strategy:
Now you may already be ranking your leads A,B,C or Hot, Warm, Cold or numerically, but what we’re trying to find out using lead scoring is who should marketing be continuing to communicate with, who needs to be sent to sales right now, and who will never buy from us at all.
Source: What is lead scoring?
Visitors:
A techFAQ post provides great tips on how to track those who are visiting your site:
The more data you can collect from visitors, the more productive and effective your content, campaigns and services can be. There are many ways to track website visitors. Some of the more popular include:
- Free website tracking software
- Analytic software
- Services that track and analyze data for you
Source: How do I Track Website Visitors?
Marketing Measurements:
“Planning an Internet marketing strategy?” asks June Campbell, in Internet Marketing or What’s That You Said?
Will you get the best ROI from a CPA, CPC, PPL, or a hybrid model? And how will you track your CPM and determine your CTR?
Make sure to also check out KD Paine’s slides from the June 09 MarketingProfs B2B Forum, Tales from the Trenches, How Organizations Are Measuring Value in Social Media.
Landing Page Effectiveness:
According to a Copyblogger post, “a landing page is any page on a website where traffic is sent specifically to prompt a certain action or result.” The post provides various tutorials and makeovers, for developing effective landing pages. Source: Landing Pages Turn Traffic Into Money.
Web Analytics:
Some measure visits (each time someone visits your web site, within a half hour), versus a visitor who makes multiple visits to your website, within a month.
Related Links
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Every day I am always more astounded about online marketing based on understanding the way the the next generation deal with with the world with computers. My 11 year old grandson just showed me a website they had launched to organize popular topics for their . They wanted to know the way to launch online advertising on the page to generate revenue. I must tell you I am very poud.